An Evaluation Study On Maritime College English(Listening, Watching&Speaking) From The Perspective Of STCW Convention

Since China joined WTO, it has been a highly competitive developing country which occupies an important position in international shipping industry. High demands of effective communicative competence of seafarers are also put forward with the rapid development of shipping industry. How to make the mariners communicate efficiently and make the crew comprehensive quality improved have become research focuses of relevant education and training institutions. With the coming of STCW2010Manila Amendments, more specific requirements for seafarers’ effective communicative competence are proposed. As English textbooks are important components of nautical education, they are very crucial for cultivating effective communicative competence of seamen. Though researches about teaching materials keep emerging, it is rare for maritime college English audio-visual textbooks to be evaluated on the aspect of cultivating the communicative competence.Maritime College English (Listening, Watching and Speaking) is a crucial component of Maritime College English. This series of books are applied to navigation majors’English teaching of Maritime University of Dalian and a dozen domestic colleges to make attempt to combine General English with maritime English in order to adapt to the English teaching reform and to foster the practical talents through cultivating students’ communicative competence. In view of this, this study is based on the entry standards given by STCW78/10, combining the teaching materials’ evaluation theories of Robinson and Cunningsworth with the research approaches of questionnaire and interview, bonding the quantitative approaches with the qualitative one to evaluate the MCELWS from the perspective of cultivating the communicative competence of seafarers. The study shows that MCELWS is basically in conformity with the language requirements toward seafarers’effective communicative competence of STCW78/10. The pedagogies of the books are close to the IMO Model Course. The authenticity of the materials is generally strong enough to meet the real situations at sea and the interestingness of topics design is helpful for communication. Besides, the connection between EGP and ESP in MCELWS is fine for cultivating communicative competence. According to the evaluation statistical data of students and teachers, the difficulty level of MCELWS tends to be high for freshmen of different language levels. It affects their interest of English learning to some extent. In view of the above problems, suggestions to the edition of MCELWS and its related maritime college English teaching are proposed.